Men’s basketball: Cyclones finding transfers harder to come by

What was once a stream of players that flooded Iowa State with talent and success has slowed to an infrequent trickle.

Transfer U has seen a marked decline in enrollment.

When the Cyclones take the floor next season, it’ll be without a Division I transfer for the first time under coach Fred Hoiberg.

“I don’t know if I’m going to know how to coach this team,” Hoiberg said with a laugh.

Hoiberg brought in five transfers his first year in Ames and two more in his second.

Six of those seven players were a part of an NCAA tournament team at ISU and two played in a pair of tournaments.

Next year, ISU’s starting lineup could feature as many as four players who began their career at ISU.

The transfer pool remains well-stocked, but ISU is no longer among the only ones fishing it.

“Everybody’s doing it now,” Hoiberg said. “There is a lot of competition.”

Three of this year’s Final Four teams had at least one transfer on their roster.

“These guys have become huge commodities,” said Jeff Goodman, CBS Sports’ college basketball insider and curator of the site’s transfer list, which catalogues every Division I transfer.

The number of transfers this year has reached 350 players while last year’s list numbered 450.

After bringing in Royce White, Chris Allen, Chris Babb, Jake Anderson and Anthony Booker followed by Will Clyburn and Korie Lucious, ISU targeted a pair of high-profile transfers this past offseason.

The Cyclones missed out as those targets picked Marquette (Trent Lockett) and Florida (Dorian Finney-Smith).

Both of those programs advanced to the Elite Eight of the NCAA tournament this past season.

“You look at these kids leaving that were solid players,” Hoiberg said, “you look at their list (of scholarship offers), it’s pretty impressive the interest a lot of these kids are garnering.”

The grad-transfer rule that allows graduated seniors with remaining eligibility to transfer without sitting out a season has also contributed to the burgeoning transfer market.

“I think a lot of high-major (coaches) now are literally scanning the rosters of mid-major teams,” Goodman said, “and trying to find a guy that can graduate this summer and still have a year left to play right away.

“That’s become almost another avenue for high-major schools to recruit.”

Even the players who need to satisfy the NCAA’s rule that transfers sit a year have attributes that make them more attractive for scholarship offers than prep players.

“One way to look at it is you’ve got 13 scholarships and 13 guys aren’t going to play,” Hoiberg said. “If you’re comfortable you’ve (enough) guys that can go out there and play, if you’ve got a couple guys sitting out that can really play, that have been through some of the growing pains that freshmen go through at other programs and are confident that they will fit in with your system and will have good chemistry, then I think it’s a pretty good route.”

It’s a path that even the country’s blue bloods have begun to take.

“That’s new,” Goodman said. “That didn’t happen years ago.”

Two of the nation’s most successful programs and coaches — Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski and Kansas’ Bill Self — are sparring over Memphis transfer Tarik Black, who averaged all of 8 points in 20 minutes per game last year for the Tigers.

But Black has three years of college ball under his belt, is 6-foot-9 and, most importantly, is eligible to play immediately.

“If you’re Duke, what do you have to lose?” Goodman said. “You’ve got scholarships available anyway, there’s nobody else out there right now.

“You’re not picking up a high school guy that’s good enough, so if you’re Coach K … why not bring him in?”

In some ways, ISU has become a victim of its own success, showing that teams built with transfers can find wins — many of them, in fact, and quickly.

“I think other schools look at Iowa State and certainly say, ‘Well, it’s worked for Fred Hoiberg and his staff, maybe we should explore it a little bit more,’” Goodman said. “It’s not just because of Iowa State. There’s plenty of other schools that have had success with transfers, it’s just that Hoiberg was kind of forced to and had success with it quickly with a bunch of them.

“I think that made it a little more hip to do it because they had success.”

The Cyclones’ Division I transfer-free lineup isn’t likely to last past this year, though, and for a time it looked like the 2013-14 season would be continue the transfer legacy.

ISU inked USC transfer Maurice Jones last fall with the intention of playing him in the last half of this upcoming season, but Jones was ruled ineligible to play at ISU by the NCAA.

And just last week Abdel Nader, a transfer from Northern Illinois, pledged to ISU and cited its work with transfers as part of his reasoning.

“They’ve been so successful with transfers in the past,” Nader said. “A lot of them have turned into pros.

“That was definitely big.”

The Cyclones under Hoiberg will continue to wade into the transfer waters in order to get talent. They’ll also remain an attractive destination because of their track record.

But they’ll also have to fight the big-time recruiting battles that were once reserved for the nation’s top prep players in order to bring in the type of veteran Division I talent that took them from Big 12 irrelevance to back-to-back NCAA tournaments.

“It’s a route that pretty much every school is going with now,” Hoiberg said, “and that’s kind of the landscape of our game.”

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